About Me

Monday, March 14, 2011

Wow. It's been almost a month since I last posted anything here. It's not that I haven't done anything interesting, but rather that we are settling in and life is much more of a routine. Saturday go to the market for tuna, vegetables, and fruit. Sunday go to church. Monday through Friday do pretty much the same routine from week to week.

One note of interest is that our lawyer submitted our application for a permanent visa, with all the necessary paperwork, last Thursday, and she was told to check back with them in a month, as they expected that it would be ready by that time. I hope that it is, as that is a pre-requisite to being able to bring down our household goods without having to pay any duty on them.

People here have told me that it is unseasonably cold right now. Given that we are about three degrees south of the equator, the sun is almost perfectly straight overhead at noon right now. Then as the year progresses it will move on north, such that by June 21 it will be about 26 degrees north of vertical at noon. It will then reverse this course and pass back straight overhead about the first week in October en route to the winter solstice when it will be about 20 degrees south of straight overhead.

In this discussion I have used the reference of the northern hemisphere, even though we are technically in the southern hemisphere, as that is what is familiar to most of my readers. It is also worth noting that if you live north of the Tropic of Capricorn, which is 23 degrees north latitude, you will never see the sun straight overhead at noon. It is always offset somewhat to the south, even on the first day of summer.

It is also worth noting that on the equator the length of the day never changes. It is always twelve hours with the sun up and twelve with it down. Here it actually does vary slightly, but it is on the order of twenty minutes difference between the longest and shortest days of the year. So there is no reason to mess around with Daylight Savings Time, and they don't. So nyah-nyah-nyah to all you folks who have to set your clocks forward and backward each spring and fall, and who did so just this last weekend.